Word: melodrama
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...years ago, the Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert, made Menace II Society, a violent melodrama whose film-school flash won kudos. Last year's top novice was Kevin Smith, with his clever, scratchy comedy Clerks. Now these twentysomething phenoms are flouting the sophomore slump--the Hugheses with the epic-size Dead Presidents, Smith with the loosey-goosey comedy Mallrats. Joining them in the ambition to reach a wider audience is gay cult fave Gregg Araki, who gives his new tragi-comedy, The Doom Generation, the cunning subtitle "a heterosexual movie." The director of the homo-erratic dramas The Living...
...history of Myanmar, as Burma is now called, resonates with melodrama and tragedy. The heroic battle of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for her nonviolent resistance against the ruling junta, is surely worth a movie. But in Hollywood the problems of one little country--or one big country with little brown people--don't amount to a hill of unsold scripts. The Burmese must have a Caucasian mediator, Laura, whose sufferings illuminate those of the locals...
...announce: "This one has everything! A desperate battle for survival! Mother Nature on a rampage! Heroic attempts to achieve the impossible! A psychological crap shoot with zillions at stake! And, at the center, a stark battle between two strong-willed men. It's got the potential for great movie melodrama. We call it The Making of Waterworld...
Alas, director Danny Cannon hasn't the skill to make majestic melodrama plausible. As for the facetiousness, Rob Schneider sweats arsenals of ammunition as Dredd's sarcastic sidekick. But the effect is redundant since Sly is his own comic relief. By now Stallone has become a symbol for all that is goofy and grandiloquent in Hollywood's live-action summer cartoons. The hormone that courses through his movie veins could be called preposterone...
...Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), she bedazzled John Garfield into murder; in Johnny Eager (1942), she helped Robert Taylor live up to his character's name. Her turn in 1957's Peyton Place won her an Oscar nomination. She followed it with a role in the real-life melodrama that erupted when her daughter fatally knifed an abusive boyfriend of Turner's. Things went a bit better for her seven husbands; they merely got divorced...